My Newly Adopted Color: Rebecca Purple

Grandma was right: you should never judge a book by its cover. But the reality is, most of us pay no heed to grandma’s sound advice, and more often than not, we do judge a book solely by its cover.

Therefore, as sellers of products and ideas, it’s essential that we pay as much attention to the packaging and branding of our stuff as we do to the actual stuff that we sell.

And when it comes to branding and packaging, color is undoubtedly one of the most important visible elements. When it comes to making purchasing decisions, a great many of us decide by visual cues, the strongest and most persuasive of these visual cues being color.

So, what is the color of your personal brand? And more importantly, why did you pick this, of all colors, to be your favorite color?

Recently I set out to answer these very questions for my own personal brand and online platform.

My immediate instinct was to Google the meanings commonly assigned to colors. So I guzzled a ton of blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos and even read a whole book on color psychology. My intention was to pick a dominant color that would best align with my personality and purpose, the world I’m trying to build for myself and my family, and the kind of impact I want to make in the world.

But as I dived in, I quickly discovered that I was on a fool’s errand. That’s because for every positive attribute I found for any color, I also found an equal number of negative attributes for the very same color, often from the same source.

Want a “happy” color? Go for the sunshine color, Yellow. It stands for optimism, warmth, friendliness. But, not so fast! Yellow is also associated with criticism, impulsiveness, and egoism.

Blue is deemed to be the color of loyalty, trust, and integrity. But it can also stand for rigid, deceitful and spiteful. Hmmm.

Green supposedly stands for growth, vitality, renewal, and restoration. But blue is also envious, selfish, greedy, and miserly.

And so on, and so forth, ad infinitum. And don’t even get me started on the contradictions in meaning from the various experts out there. Color, it seems, is too dependent on personal experiences to be universally translated to specific feelings and meanings.

So, in the end, I gave up on the search for meaning and instead, decided to simply pick a color or two from my favorite brands. That is, until I reconnected with Rebecca purple and this amazing story of digital remembrance.

The Color Rebecca purple (CSS: rebeccapurple)

REBECCA ALISON MEYERpassed away on her sixth birthday. Having survived rounds of treatment for cancer, the little girl, the adored daughter of Kathryn and Eric Meyer, finally succumbed.

For those of you who make all or even part of your living from designing websites, ERIC MEYER should be no stranger to you. For the rest of us, Eric A. Meyer is an American web design consultant and author. He is best known for his advocacy work on behalf of web standards, most notably Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), a technique for managing how websites are styled and displayed.

His daughter Rebecca Alison Meyer died on June 7th, 2014 on her 6th birthday, less than a year after her diagnosis of grade 3 (anaplastic) astrocytoma, a kind of brain tumor.

To honor the life of Rebecca, and in appreciation for her father’s tireless contribution to the development of web standards, the CSS standards community officially adopted the name “Rebecca purple,” for the hue (#663399), Rebecca’s favorite color.

I’ve known Eric Meyer (albeit from a distance) and his works for over a decade now. I was even familiar with the unfortunate passing of Rebecca, and the story of the named color, Rebecca purple. I may have even used this named once or so in my CSS stylesheets.

But it was only recently, while searching for meaning, that I reconnected with the story and the color. But after this reconnection, I knew I had found my true love, I knew I had found my true color.

Instead of a mishmash of contrasting perceptions and beliefs, Rebecca purple is a story of love that I can relate to.

So, now, Rebecca purple is my favorite color. It will be the dominant color of my personal brand into the foreseeable future. I’ve even decided to use this story as the introductory hook into all my presentations, both online and offline, to highlight the importance of service and devotion to one’s commission.

So what is your favorite color? And what’s the story behind your choice of this color? Kindly share your story with us in the comments section below.